Will universities stay ahead of the game?

Friday

Mar 28, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 28, 2014 at 2:45 PM

Madison Taylor / Times-News

We sat at a counter — five people in all. Many of us were meeting for the first time. Common ground was pretty much the lunch directly in front of us. We all agreed that the soup of the day ladled from the nearby hot bar appeared to have some relationship to tomato.

But that’s all we could commit to at this point.

We sat down at Company Shops Market Co-Op at roughly the same time. It’s like that often at lunch in the place many thought would never work but has found its niche downtown. One in the group that day was from the field of medicine -- a doctor. Another had something to do with faith. Two were lawyers. And there was me, of course.

As usual, I was the least substantial person there. I’m used to it.

Names were exchanged, a few pleasantries. Beside me along the same counter, three men were having an animated discussion about chess with a board between them. All the tables were otherwise packed. I wondered briefly if I was in the right place.

Yes, in some ways this isn’t your father’s Burlington. Times change, sometimes for the better.

Small talk was tiny to the point of being almost minuscule. I’m not always comfortable around strangers. Conversation isn’t what I do best. I’m a writer, after all, and still prone to blurting out stupid stuff on a keyboard even when I have time to think about it. I usually expect others to be exactly the same way. It’s always a shock when they’re not.

The person of faith, as is the usual custom, tried to keep conversation moving. We learned that two among us were attorneys. One is a Carolina grad; the other owns a degree from Wake Forest.

It would get uncomfortably silent for a moment or two while we all fetched forkfuls of this and a spoonful of that. It was lunch after all. Potential topics of conversation were fired like flares. For a while, no one rode to the rescue.

And then someone — and at this point I’m only certain it wasn’t me — brought up a ruling rendered the previous day regarding private colleges and universities. It was done in passing, like, “Well, things will certainly change for private schools, now …”

“You mean the one about scholarship athletes being employees?” I asked.

Heads nodded in the affirmative.

This I could talk about.

INDEED ON Wednesday a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board in Illinois ruled that football players who are on full scholarships at Northwestern University could unionize because they are considered employees of the school. At the moment this only impacts Northwestern and only the football team. And really, no immediate changes are expected there either.

But it won’t stay that way for long. Ultimately, this issue will spread.

“I think you can extrapolate that,” one of the attorneys at the counter said, “to all private universities. This could have a major impact on private schools.”

And ultimately public universities, too, I thought to myself, and then stated it to the agreement of the others.

We pondered why such a ruling was made and quickly agreed that participation in collegiate athletics takes a lot of practice time — not to mention travel and overnight hotel stays. Schoolwork becomes a secondary concern.

“Teams in the ACC now make road trips from Syracuse to Miami,” I said. “Not too many years ago all the league trips could be made by bus.”

We mulled whether players might be paid or if scholarships would be considered taxable income for the new players/employees. The impact on basketball and then non-revenue sports came up. One wondered if other extracurricular activities could face changes.

“I was a musician in college,” one said. “We had to provide concerts or perform at certain places.”

“There are a lot of things to this when you think about it,” another added.

“It should be interesting,” I agreed.

THE IMPACT of this rather narrow ruling won’t be felt for a good, long time. At the moment, its single point of review is one regional arbitrating board. There are still multiple levels of court appeals to come before this thing becomes a reality. Universities are going to fight and fight hard.

“It’ll probably go to the Supreme Court,” an attorney at the counter said.

Indeed it will.

But it’s hard to ignore that this also opens the door to an incredible opportunity — a chance for college athletics to jump into a collective delousing tank and clean up a little. Slime does come off.

I keep coming back to the recent problems with academic fraud at UNC — something the national media continues to pick up and report as if it’s fresh news every other week. And I also know that UNC isn’t alone. That this kind of thing happens in a lot of places where big-time sports have encroached on university life with the lure of equally big-time money. Earlier this month at Wake Forest, fans rolled the Quad — something historically done after big wins — after the basketball coach was fired.

Things are obviously a mess.

And then I read this in the NLRB report in the Northwestern case.

“The record makes clear that the employer’s scholarship players are identified and recruited in the first instance because of their football prowess and not because of their academic achievement in high school.” It was also noted that among the evidence presented by Northwestern, “no examples were provided of scholarship players being permitted to miss entire practices and/or games to attend their studies.”

Sometimes things do need to change. And it’s usually best to take it on before being forced to do so.

Madison Taylor is editor of the Times-News. Contact him at mtaylor@thetimesnews.com